Cosmopolis continues to impress at year-end. First up are nominations for the Vancouver Critics Awards. Excerpt from The Province:

Director Steven Spielberg’s political backroom history tale Lincoln and David Cronenberg’s New York limo odyssey Cosmopolis have emerged as this year’s front-runners as the Vancouver Film Critics Circle narrowed its short list for the year’s best international and Canadian movies.

Lincoln is leading the critics’ international category with five nominations: best picture, best director, best actor for Daniel Day-Lewis as the U.S. Civil War president, best supporting actor for Tommy Lee Jones as a pro-civil rights legislator, and best screenplay for scribe Tony Kushner.

Canadian director Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis leads the home-grown competition with four nominations: best Canadian film, best director, best actor for Robert Pattinson, and two best supporting actress nominations, for Sarah Gadon and Samantha Morton.

The Film Stage: One of the Best Ensembles of 2012 – It’s not enough that Robert Pattinson proves his genuine acting chops with David Cronenberg‘s latest, but he’s also surrounded by one of the most versatile ensembles of the year in this story of a man and one wild mission to get a hair-cut. Whether they are popping in and out of his limousine or showing up elsewhere on Pattinson’s journey, the group comprised of Juliette Binoche, Sarah Gadon, Mathieu Amalric, Jay Baruchel, Kevin Durand, K’naan, Emily Hampshire and Samantha Morton each provide memorable insight to Pattinson’s dense lifestyle. Capping off with one of Paul Giamatti’s best turns in some time, this is one of the strongest ensembles of the year.

The London Film Review: Number 1 out of 10 most overlooked films of 2012! Click HERE to read their comments on why Cosmopolis was number 1 and why it shouldn’t even be on that list. 🙂

Dread Central – Named Cosmopolis among the top 5 Best of 2012 – David Cronenberg’s misunderstood character study shows us how the 1% can be the most dangerous creatures of all. Robert Pattinson finally breaks away from those godawful Twilight movies, giving a powerhouse performance as a sociopathic Wall Street tycoon who is truly off his rocker. It’s a claustrophic head journey through a class-warfare apocalypse and a step back in the right direction for one of this genre’s greatest visionaries.

24fps: David Cronenberg named Best Director and Pattinson, Best Actor – David Cronenberg has been one of my favourite filmmakers for about twenty years, and this year he served up both his worst and his best film for many years. A Dangerous Method was a personality-free disaster, but Cosmopolis, despite its largely constrained environment (most of the film takes place in the back of a limo), pulsed with energy, contemporary relevance, and customary Cronenbergian themes and wit. There are layers upon layers here, both in Cronenberg’s own talky, challenging, and very funny script and in the visuals which give us a sense of how dislocated and insulated from the world Robert Pattinson’s billionaire character is. Cronenberg also marshals a large cast of actors capably, and manages to draw a throughline in a film that could easily just be a series of disjointed scenes. It’s his most interesting, and, I suspect, most personal film in at least 15 years….If you had told me at the beginning of this year that I’d ever write Robert Pattinson’s name under Best anything (except perhaps ‘forgotten’), I’d have laughed in your face for minutes on end – especially after I’d seen Bel Ami – but Cosmopolis proves that behind the vacancy of Edward Cullen lurks a much darker side, and a surprising, intelligent, actor. Pattinson’s Eric Packer is more a vampire than his Twilight character; feeding off the lifeblood of the world, but hiding from its light in a coffin like limo. There’s a sense of total dislocation from the world and from people, reflected in Cronenberg’s imagery, but very present in Pattinson’s work. However, there’s complexity too; an evolution scene by scene as Packer trashes his own life bit by bit, coming closer to engaging in the world as he does so. It’s the slow cracking of that mask that is so remarkable in Pattinson’s performance. I just hope that – unlike Hayden Christensen after Shattered Glass – Pattinson seeks out more challenging work, because here he’s a revelation.

Film School Rejects: 3 out of 12 best movie soundtracks and scores of 2012 – David Cronenberg’s films can be a bit of a trip, full of odd imagery and interesting questions, butCosmopolis also turned to music and sound to drive the story as much as any of the curious characters that populated the film. Composer Howard Shore teamed up with the band Metric to create a kinetic, cutting edge score that is also haunting, mirroring the disenchanted life of the film’s lead, rich kid Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson.) More than simply creating music that became a character in its own right within the film, Shore and Metric proved that classic composers and rock bands can (and should) come together to create music that is not only interesting, but also thought provoking.

Huffington Post: Number 2 out of 10 – Cosmopolis exposes most millennial concerns of identity, apathy, physical vs. meta value, telecommunications and sexual dissatisfaction during a 24-hour traffic jam created by three equal physical events: the arrival of the president into a city, an Occupy Wall Street-esque protest and the funeral procession for a recently deceased celebrity. Eric Parker (Robert Pattinson) is in a traveling wi-fi hotspot: his limousine. He is the creator of a financial analysis system that traces monetary rate movements by fractions of fractions of a second, these fractions make Parker rich and most likely the cause of a pre-reactionary panic that causes economic collapses. At 28, he’s old at this game now, and thus in a state of deep reflection. Because the dialogue is mostly lifted directly from Don DeLillo’s highly literate source material, Cosmopolis has a lot of ideas, only a fraction of which might register on first viewing. But because it’s DeLillo, it is also very funny. And because it’s directed by David Cronenberg, every limo stop feels threatening; both Cronenberg and the cast (particularly Sarah Gadon as Parker’s old-money wife and Kevin Durand as his security) understand that DeLillo’s satire is best served in monotone.

Badass Digest: 3 out of 10 underrated movies of 2012 – I never reviewed Cosmopolis. I keep wrestling with it – I still am wrestling with – but it’s that wrestling which convinces me the film is something more than a misstep from Cronenberg. The parts of the movie that work are so mesmerizing, so fascinating, so strange and so surreally interesting that they’re worth engaging completely. The other parts… well, the movie goes off the rails, that’s for sure. And even the parts that are on the rails can be quite polarizing, with an ugly, flat, green screened look alienating people immediately. The movie is not Cronenberg’s best looking, and the script is very theatrical, and the performances are almost impossibly mannered – but those are all plusses. This is a weird film, a film that refuses to meet you anywhere near halfway. If you’re willing to go all the way to Cosmopolis‘ side, you’ll be rewarded.

Film News (UK): Placing 4th out of 10 – At four is Cosmopolis, which saw a predatory Robert Pattinson play a billionaire financier in David Cronenberg’s film noir. Pattinson later credited the film with pulling him from a spiral of depression which threatened to stall his post-Twilight career.

Buzzine: 1 of the top 5 Indie movies of 2012 – If you’ve learned anything from David Cronenberg at all, you should know to never have expectations. If you, for instance, believed Cosmopolis, (adapted from the Don DeLillo novel) would be in the same vein of his now iconic body horror fare, you would be so very wrong. Reading much like a play, where characters stare off into space and seem to be speaking in riddles, Cosmopolis’ stark tones and direction fuse with a surprisingly confident performance fromTwilight’s vampiric hunk Robert Pattinson to create yet another intriguing controversial masterpiece from the iconic Cronenberg.

TV without Pity: On a list of best films you may have missed – David Cronenberg and Robert Pattinson may seem like an unlikely team, but they each benefitted from their partnership. Pattinson got some much-needed acting cred for his darkly funny performance as a Master of the Universe who embarks on a surrealistic journey through the streets of New York, while Cronenberg was able to use his star’s box-office power to make this challenging movie his way — Cosmopolis features some of the most stylish and inventive direction of his career. Considering how well this movie worked out, we wouldn’t object to a Cronenberg and Pattinson reunion.

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